What Now? Parents, teachers, and legislators cannot wait any longer; they want to do something about the ever-rising levels of anxiety, distraction, and suffering. Whose policy prescriptions should they follow, given the current state of the evidence and the relative risks and costs associated with each path? If leaders and change-makers were to embrace Odgers' causal theory about the "real causes" rather than being "distracted" by mine, then the way forward is to first solve society's biggest social problems, most of which we have been working on for decades. Perhaps this time we'll make more progress, and in ten or twenty years, rates of teen mental illness will begin to decline. And if Odger's causal theory turns out to be wrong? We'll have spent another decade or two locked in the usual culture war battles over spending on social programs that may or may not be effective, and we will have lost another generation to mental illness. In contrast, if leaders and change makers were to embrace my account of the "great rewiring of childhood," in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, what policy implications follow? That we should roll back the phone-based childhood, especially in elementary school and middle school because of the vital importance of protecting kids during early puberty. More specifically, we'd try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:
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